Islands
The Cataño ferry skims over the bay. Blue water shimmers in the humid air and I tug my sticky blouse from under my arms. The bastions of Old San Juan rise up, stark and ancient. My mother and grandmother sit huddled together on an undulating deck bench, their glares just as severe.
The ferry glides into dock. People rise and shuffle in a line to disembark through a creaking turnstile. My mom stands before the rotating doors as if afraid to move.
“Come on, Mom. I’ll help you.” I take her arm to guide her. She jerks away from me and smacks me twice with her oversize purse.
Stunned, I back away. We leave the ferry in strained silence. I fight tears and walk beside my grandmother up the winding path into the old city.
“Your mother is having a lot of problems with your brother,” she whispers.
“Why is she angry with me?” I ask, frustration pounding in my head, but my grandmother just shrugs.
We enter a courtyard called Parque de las Palomas, where several pigeons squabble from nests in niches cut in a stone wall. Opposite, over the low city rampart, the bay stretches before us, lapping around El Morro, the Spanish Fort, a grim citadel close by. The breeze carries a lush tropical scent mixed with decay.
My mother stands stiff and indignant, ignoring the beauty of this white colonial town with its narrow, blue-bricked streets and lacy wrought-iron balconies. I try to ask what’s wrong, but she turns a frozen shoulder—always staging her private play where I’m not allowed a speaking part. I feel to suffer the punishment, one should at least understand the crime.
After desultory sight-seeing, we return on the ferry and catch a taxi back to the navy base. Before I moved here, I’d naively pictured myself residing in a hut on a white sandy beach with swaying palm fronds, not in a military compound with square, cinder-block houses all the same—cold conformity in a humid climate.
“The baby is sick again,” my husband says when we walk in.
I pick up my one-week-old son, hearing his little chest rumble with congestion. I press his warm cheek to mine. At the same time, my toddler hugs my knees. I trail my fingers through his golden hair.
My mother mutters something and goes to her guest room. I’m too tired and sad to be angry with her. My grandmother shakes her head.
Mom comes out with her suitcase. “Your grandmother and I are going to St. Thomas.”
“Why? You just got here.” My confusion makes her more self-righteous. “Fine, then go.”
We drop them off at the airport on the way to the hospital. My mother and grandmother had flown to Puerto Rico to help me after the birth of my second child. Mom arrived and left again with baggage she refused to unlock.
In our dilapidated Mustang, we rattle the sixty miles of back roads—through steaming jungle bordered by kiosks advertising pineapples and mangos in every form possible—to the naval hospital.
“Your son has a hole in his heart. But he’s too young for surgery. We’ll have to wait and see,” the pediatrician says.
At home once more, I care for my frail child while my husband works shift-work, back to back night shifts, sleeping days, double-backs, no time for exhausted wives. My hyper toddler fills my days, my wheezing infant cries all night. His clothes cling to his wriggling body, damp from the humidifier that adds to the sultry island air.
“I feel really sad, doctor, so tired.” Afraid, alone, depressed! I tell the OB/GYN on my next checkup.
“You’re young, you’ll be fine,” the unsympathetic Lt. says with a dismissive smirk, one of many; hysterical wives weren’t issued with his seabag.
Who knew that post-partem depression would become a recognized medical condition many years later? I thought I’d lost my mind.
A post card from St. Thomas extols the beauty of that island, and a hint of wishing for forgiveness for my mother’s eccentricities.
I read somewhere that eccentric is just a frivolous word for insanity. It must gallop through my family.
Still not one word on these “problems” with my brother. But my grandmother had whispered something about drugs.
I buzz on the outside of my family, trying to squeeze through like a fly, ramming my head against the screen of my mother’s silence. Four years previously my brother and I had unrolled green mesh like new sod and nailed it to the shutters of my house in Greece to keep out the insects. Those flies managed to burrow their way in, welcoming themselves if unwelcomed by us. I just splatter.
In fitful dreams my brother and I remain children. I roam inside the house I grew up in, still dressed in its hues of orange and avocado. I see my father sipping his spiked orange juice to drown out failures kept secret by my mother.
I climb our backyard tree, not the stump my mother reduced it to because she tired of the apples, but still tall with spreading arms. Branches that grasped toward our tarpaper roof, heavy with green fruit, tart and crisp to bite. My brother scuttling to the top, his high-top keds just out of my reach—a blond, buzz-cut boy with an impish smile.
He climbs to the roof where “tuck and roll” pigeons flutter in cages; below a chicken squawks and kittens frolic among the perfume of gardenias. The orange stucco wall, rough to the touch, doesn’t stop me from floating through, into my past. My mother locked in her room, taking valium “naps,” out of my reach in her shadowed corner.
The house deteriorated as I grew, as did my parents, a job lost, plumbing neglected, a toilet ripped out, holes in plaster to chase leaks, wiring that sprouts from walls like angry worms. My father, once so adept, grown fat, an atoll surrounded by a sea of alcohol.
Growing up, I never thought my family wasn’t normal. We were dysfunctional before the trend.
****
A knock on the front door.
“I have a phone call at the quarterdeck,” my husband says after speaking with someone on the front stoop. In Puerto Rico, it’s too expensive for us to have our own phone.
Seven months have passed since my mother’s visit. My son is better and never needs the surgery. His own body repaired the hole, a miracle.
My husband drives off. The wall air-conditioner whooshes and drones. I pat medicated powder over the back of my oldest son’s heat rash, little bumps on his fair skin.
The mee mees buzz outside. Tiny mosquito-like blood suckers.
My husband returns, his expression strange. “Your mother will call back. She wanted to speak to me first. Your brother has died.”
“What?” All the usual questions bubble up, but most of all disbelief. No one in my family has ever died. Well, my dad’s parents, but they were old when I was born.
It’s April Fools Day, yet I know it isn’t a joke.
“How?” is all I can ask. What a simple, stupid, inadequate word. Of course, it’s a huge mistake.
“He was on drug treatment for heroin. He overdosed.”
“On the treatment? How is that possible?” I want to scream, but I’m still in denial.
“Let’s go to the front gate. She’s calling back.”
In a daze, we pack the boys into the car. The mee mee’s splatter against the windshield. We rattle through the darkening cookie-cutter houses.
Why didn’t she give me the dignity of calling me first? More of my mother’s bizarre behavior. Her voice on the phone is more distant than just the thousands of miles that separate us. “We’ll have him cremated. We don’t want to be tied to a grave.”
She’s indifferent, cold. I knew virtually nothing of my brother’s addiction, thanks to her secret-keeping, and now I must deal with his unexpected death.
I’m furious at her, though all I do is cry. She seems to resent my tears.
Her silence is a torment, an insult. I scratch at mee mee bites and want to smash the receiver against the plaster wall.
I slide back into the car. I cuddle my children and mourn my brother and the relationship I’ll never have with my mother. No emotion is allowed in her world. She stews privately on whatever demons she harbors. Am I not entitled to feel bewildered by any of this?
I look to my husband. “If I’d known, I could have said goodbye.”
“I know, I know.” He tries to comfort me.
“They don’t want to be tied to a grave?” My childhood playmate tossed to the wind. When did my parents become this odd couple, apathetic, dull?
As a little girl, I remember Mom as nurturing to me and my brother. Always there for us, active in our school, making Halloween costumes, caramel apples, cookies for Christmas; Brownie leader and Cub Scout den mother. Was this all a façade? What hopes had she once envisioned that were never fulfilled?
I smell the sweet, baby scent of my sons and vow never to become like her.
****
My children are grown and healthy, my marriage thrives.
Fifteen years after my brother’s death my father passed on, cirrhosis. Mother is still the grim citadel beyond my shore, refusing to be close to me or her grandsons, unwilling to give up her secrets, to come down off her stone perch. She insists that she loves us, at a distance, on the surface. Maybe that’s why in dreams I keep haunting the house of my youth, searching for an explanation.
In dreams I still laugh and romp with those I’ve lost, and awaken fuddle-headed, pondering their stumble through pungent leaves, spirits, white powder and disappointment.
Looking back from just as many years, I know we could have handled it better. As I struggle with the rough turns of life, I strive to make my own warm. Her neglect has made me strong, not weak. My children are secure in my love. I’ve come to realize I may never understand my mother’s limitations. I just strain not to be damaged by them.
A friend once told me that a psychiatrist advised her “she would never have the mother she wanted, only the one she had.”
As I pursue my own hopes in the second half of my journey, I try to reconcile myself to this woman on her arctic atoll, and the part of me that is missing because of her rejection.
Long ago, I realized you can’t let your childhood define you if it holds you down. Remember the caramel apples, the warm holidays of my youth, my father’s reading from The Wind in the Willows; Peter and the Wolf on the phonograph. My brother and I laughing at the follies of the adults. Don’t look too close at the edges, where it’s darker, and deeper, in the sea of memory and dreams.
